


to cross a sea of stars

by andreaphobia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, a story of you and me, pretension, the untold stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 14:22:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11186946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/pseuds/andreaphobia
Summary: In which Keith learns the meaning of love, and loss.





	to cross a sea of stars

**Author's Note:**

> > The Qixi Festival, also known as the Qiqiao Festival, is a Chinese festival that celebrates the annual meeting of the cowherd and weaver girl in Chinese mythology. It falls on the seventh day of the 7th month on the Chinese calendar.  
> The festival originated from the romantic legend of two lovers, Zhinü and Niulang, who were the weaver maid and the cowherd, respectively. The tale of The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd has been celebrated in the Qixi Festival since the Han Dynasty.  
>  _-[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qixi_Festival)_  
> 
> 
>   
>  Written while listening to _bless_ from the Zankyou no Terror soundtrack on repeat. This story was started sometime in summer last year, but only recently finished, in an uncharacteristic fit of motivation.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

 

 

i.

Memories have a way of coming back at the strangest of times. Just when you think you've forgotten something, it raises its ugly head.

Tonight, Keith remembers his father in bits and pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle overturned across the floor. Just fragments of color, sensation, sound bites like the backing track ripped from an old film reel; the touch of his hand, the way he smoothed the covers down over Keith’s knees and stroked his hair, and how he had the face of a man in a photograph he’d seen a long time ago.

While the other boys stay up late into the night, reminiscing about home with their voices coming and going, coming and going, he lies back in his bunk, bedded amongst coarse blankets and thin sheets; shuts his eyes and lets his mind wander. In the black space behind his eyelids, memories surface like things rising out of dark water: _now, look. Be a good boy, lie still, and I’ll tell you a story_. And sure, it was always the same old story, but when you’re seven years old with sleepy eyes you don’t ask for much.

 _There was a boy who met a girl—_ yes— _in heaven_ —yes, that’s how it went— _and they fell in love_. There’s some more window-dressing: cowherd, weaver girl, Altair and Vega. (And you just _know_ this is going to be good, because when a story starts in heaven, there’s only one way to go from there: down.) Fall into love, not knowing nor thinking, or maybe it sticks out a leg so it can trip you and catch you. Either way. And then: the guillotine. The hammer falls, judgment from heaven, the sound of it drowning out all tenderness, all forgiveness, because love has a way of getting in the way of the things you need to do.

So: take two sides of a river, put one person on each side, and also the river is made of stars, so you can’t cross it. (Just pretend this bit makes sense.) But you can if you have a bridge, so you get one, only the river overflows whenever it rains and makes your bridge a useless heap of junk. And for some reason, the bridge only works once a year anyhow, so you only get one chance. Blink and you’ll miss it. Blink and it’s gone.

A raindrop erupts into a shower of sparks when it lands on concrete, the way people laugh when they hear a joke. If that is the joke, then here is your punchline: boy spends the rest of his life looking at girl across sea of stars, across some mind-blowing unfathomable distance, but never meets her again. Now laugh. The joke has been told, a crescendo, a rimshot, a crash of cymbals. Or cry, because it’s the saddest thing you’ve ever heard. It doesn’t matter—when they wrote this story, they weren’t thinking about _you_.

In the end Keith doesn’t like this joke, so he takes matters into his own hands. Maybe he couldn’t find Earth on a star map if it was big enough, but everyone knows that pale blue dot, a symbol of what it means to go home. Lying there with the faint murmur of the other boys filling his ears, he forms a clear picture of it; holds it steady in his mind, the tiniest speck, an artifact, a flaw against infinite blackness. Forget the Seoul monsoons, the Saharan storms and all their bluster—tell yourself that once a year, just once a year, it doesn’t rain on Earth.

(As if this changes anything; as if, just by wishing, you could make a difference.)

 

ii.

On the run from the Garrison, Keith comes across the place where it sits, cradled in a bowl of dust; beat-up, run-down, a pile of sticks held together with spit. It didn’t belong to him; as far as he could tell it didn’t belong to anyone, but the way he sees it, surely the process of living inside it—walking across its floors, touching its walls, and breathing its air —left enough of a mark for him to start calling it his own. Like a jacket worn so constantly that it starts to take your shape, he wore the house, and it clothed him, dressed him in dry-desert loneliness.

Here, the lumpy-potato couch on which he rests his head, stained all the way through with the sour smell of spilt booze. There, the windows frosted with grime, and the meager sheet hanging before them which barely blocks the light seeping through; watery, otherworldly, as though he makes his bed upon the ocean floor. Every corner houses a tumbleweed pile of dust, and every creak of the floorboards is grey and wistful, making a sound like a lone voice in a church. The faint whirring hum of the various machines he uses for research, a constant, low thrum like life-blood in the veins of the house.

Maybe someone like Lance would have called it lonely, this existence, but Keith knows better than that. After all, to Keith, loneliness is just a state of mind—a condition, perhaps, of the weak-willed.

And besides, there are far worse things than being alone—worse than sitting on this rusted porch with natural decay, watching the wind whip the desert dust into dizzy spirals and hearing it rattle the window-latches like the thief. Better to be here than surrounded on all sides by people, inside a steel body heaving from the sweating and breathing of all the cadets and soldiers packed into it like sardines. Here, he can wrap the solitude around himself, a shield to keep the silence at bay. And when he looks up at the inky black sky, pierced through with pinpricks of light, there he sees the occasional glowing tail of a shooting star that sears the eyelids for just a moment, fleeting, like a lover’s kiss.

Years and years ago, his father told him— they were standing out on a plain much like this one, you see, and looking up at the same kind of sky—he said to Keith, you could make a wish upon a star. Maybe the gods would hear it, maybe they wouldn’t; but at any rate it was something you could do, as a person born upon this Earth.

Keith thinks he’d like to make a wish, if only he knew how. If only you could wish for something to wish for. Maybe it’s the desire that scares him— wanting something, for the very first time in your life, because wanting is how the world disappoints you. It’s like... losing something that you never even had.

In some ways he understand the Alteans’ pain, better than even they know. He knows what it means to have no place to go home to, nowhere to lay your head at night but a bunk in a castle that doesn’t belong to you, tumbling around in the vast blackness of space.

Time has shrink-wrapped the memories of his childhood, rendering them untouchable, but through the gauzy film he can still make out the shapes of things that were. A childhood with his father; comfortable in ways material, but somehow never a place where he felt like he belonged. Then the Garrison, regimented, and afterwards the shack: the first place that really felt like it belonged to him.

And then, one day, it’s gone too.

 

iii.

Keith isn’t the most observant person in the world or even just on the castle, but there are still some things he knows. Sometimes Hunk speaks wistfully of food, and Keith takes this to mean _family_. Everyone knows Katie Holt’s story. And Shiro—well, no one really knows, but Keith thinks he can’t have wanted things to turn out like this. Not _really_.

That leaves him, Keith, the guy who’s basically fine no matter where he goes, as long as he’s got someone to fight. Oh, and Lance. Lance, the biggest momma’s boy the universe has ever known, who cries with how much he misses home, if not out loud then certainly in his heart. Two polar opposites: it’s no wonder they butt heads so damn much.

And maybe it’s foolish of him to ask expecting some kind of unbiased answer: something he could deconstruct, piece by piece, and then put back together in a way that makes sense. But in the little space you can carve out between missions, with both of them bone-weary, slumped together in the hangar bay with their heads hunched in the shadow of Red and Blue, the words come to his lips anyway. He says, out loud, almost like an afterthought: _Why does everyone want to go home so much?_

At first Lance just looks at him like he’s crazy, or maybe like they’re both crazy, because he can’t believe what he’s just heard.

“... What?”

Patiently, Keith repeats himself. What he gets for his troubles is a look from Lance like he’s speaking a different language.

“Wait, are you serious?” Lance peers at him, and then shakes his head, disbelieving. “You’re actually serious right now.”

When am I ever not serious, Keith wants to know. Which makes Lance roll his eyes, but he laughs, too—from real amusement or just because he’s too tired to be angry, Keith isn't sure.

Then Lance drapes an arm over his shoulders; drags him in close enough to startle, his voice a ragged murmur against Keith’s ear.

“You really wanna know?”

Keith unfreezes himself long enough to make a stifled, jerky movement, barely a nod, but it’s enough. (At some point, he finds he’s placed his hand on Lance’s chest; pushing him back or maybe holding him in place, he doesn’t quite know, himself.)

So Lance opens his mouth and starts to speak, and Keith listens, not knowing what this means, nor understanding the feeling in Lance’s voice. Still, Keith listens, as though desire is transitive; as if he thinks he could learn this feeling by simple osmosis.

He tells Keith these things, the little things, warm things, things half-remembered from another life. Here inside this sterile castle with the artificial lighting, steel floors, steel walls, breathing the air that’s been recycled a hundred thousand times and will be a hundred thousand more, he tells Keith about waking up to the smell of pastry, his mamá’s empanadas, sizzling in the frying pan, and Mariella shrieking with giggles when papá catches her, swings her high towards the ceiling to give her that funny swooping feeling in her belly that children love. Outside, on the porch, you can hear the laundry flapping in the breeze, the same breeze which leans on the palm trees, paints the wave-tops white, gold, and seafoam green.

And somehow, Keith can’t help himself. He closes his eyes, lets this jumble of memories wash over him the way the surf brushes your feet at the water’s edge; tries to _feel_ the shape of these things in his mind. Picture the pizza shack overlooking the shore, baked by the blazing sun; the sand so hot it scalds the soles of your feet till they’re tender and pink. See the old men with their pipes and reeking of tobacco, sprawled on the steps outside the convenience store—grousing about their bones, their age, how things have changed (and how things stay the same). The stray dogs lending their voices to the sea air, the dumpster-diving seagulls, the wind in your hair—and here Lance pauses to hum a few self-conscious phrases of the song his mamá used to sing: _pasaran más de mil años, muchos más, yo no sé si tenga amor la eternidad..._

Keith doesn’t know the words to the song; doesn’t even speak the damn language, but he’s entranced all the same. The melody, soft and lilting, seems to have a meaning all its own. He listens—listens like he’s trying to carve the notes into his mind, and for some reason he thinks he’ll remember it all his life.

Then Lance stops, and silence descends between them again. Both are still. Keith feels his hand still on Lance’s chest, warm, solid, and with eyes still closed, it’s like he’s dreaming...

... but all dreams must end.

The wail of sirens break the spell, with a sudden violence. They fall away from each other and it’s like nothing ever happened. Keith blinks his eyes open, lets the world swim back into focus. The warm weight under his palm is gone. The moment is lost.

He swallows, and is surprised to find his throat has gone dry. _This is how it should be_ , he thinks. _Just let it go_.

But Lance doesn’t. When Keith passes him to go for his helmet, Lance grabs his elbow as he passes; gives him a good, hard tug to swing him right back into the circle of Lance’s arms. He leans his forehead against Keith’s, and Keith inhales sharply; breathes in the smell of him, musky, like a wicked blow to the head.

The sirens haven’t stopped, but Lance doesn’t seem to mind. He gives Keith a look; not quite a smile, but close.

“See you on the other side,” he says, and lets go.

 

iv.

Some nights he's not sure if he's awake or still dreaming; if the world that he’s in, the visions flashing before his eyes, are real or an illusion. Some nights he closes his eyes, wills himself to sleep or to dream, to wake up anywhere else but here—but when he opens them again there he is still, right smack in the middle of it and no way out.

War is hell. Someone famous once said that, but Keith thinks they’re pale words; anemic, a shade, a poor imitation. Nothing so trite could possibly capture it in all its sickening glory, as a full-body experience: the riotous sound of gunfire, people screaming in languages he doesn’t understand, the tart smell of steel and thick, strangling smoke, as everything burns around him. When he’s inside Red, piloting her, he’s insulated from it all—but out here, in the thick of it, there is no pretense, no shelter from reality.

Somewhere in the castle is a map of the sky, ablaze with a hundred lifetimes worth of violence, a never-ending war that began long before recorded human history. _Hell_ don’t even begin to scratch the surface.

(Maybe life only starts to take on its color when you’ve felt the fear of death.)

He remembers catching Shiro and the princess arguing—in hushed voices, the way you’d think parents would fight when they’re trying not to let the kids hear. _They need a break_ , he’d said. _You’re running them to the bone. You’re running_ me _to the bone_. And—Keith will never forget this, as long as he lives—the princess looked at Shiro and told him, simply, _This is war. There are no breaks in war._

Some days he’s not sure how any of them keep it together, because every day there’s another battle to be fought, a pounding, never-ending litany of violence that starts to shape everything you think and do and feel. The dark shadows of his eyes like punched-out holes in a cardboard box; his skin translucent, paper-thin, scarred faintly with veins underneath his flight suit. Here, in the moment, he wrenches his bayard from the ruins of what used to be a Galran soldier’s head, trying not to think about the word _splatter_ , and when he turns around, Lance is there.

 _Why Lance?_ he wonders. Why is it always Lance?

Said Lance hails him by aiming a spray of shots over his shoulder, providing just enough cover fire for them to swing behind an outcropping of rock for shelter.

“Watch your back, man,” Lance says, and spits. The resulting spitball is more than a little bloody. “Won’t always be there to do it for ya.”

Keith drags the back of his arm over his eyes as though that he could wipe away the too-bright flash of laser fire from his vision. I know that, he wants to say, I know, I _know—_

He’s breathing a little too hard and rough and he knows that Lance can see it, knows that Lance is seeing and judging his weakness, his bone-deep exhaustion. Or maybe it’s all inside his head, because Lance isn’t that kind of guy. What’s really happening is this: Keith recognizes his own weakness, and it’s killing him inside.

“Hey,” Lance says, and then a little louder, “ _Hey_ ,” grabbing Keith by the shoulder, holding him steady, fingers digging into his flight suit so hard it almost hurts. “Breathe. You’re fine. You know how I know you’re fine?”

How? Keith mouths, not really a word so much as a _sound_ , the noise that a cornered beast makes.

And Lance flashes him a grin; on his face, smoke-stained and blood-spattered, it looks half mad.

“‘cause your knight in shining armor is here.”

For some mad reason, in the middle of all this chaos, Keith thinks of the cowherd, the weaver girl. Their river of stars. It all comes to mind at once, a kind of incoherent flash of remembered color and sound. But it’s absurd enough, so out of place, that he realizes he’s not hyperventilating anymore.

Out loud Keith manages to say: _I don't believe in fairy tales._

“‘course you wouldn’t,” Lance says, and he can almost sound indulgent. “But you know what? Someone’s gotta.”

And Keith wants to ask why, wants to _argue_ , but Lance raises a hand, distraction on his face. The sound of pounding footsteps, drawing ever closer: more enemies on the hunt.

So Keith pushes his disorganized thoughts aside. No time to think. No breaks in war. He readies his bayard, and sees Lance do the same. There’ll be time to talk once the fighting is done... if any of them are left, that is.

 

v.

Almost an entire year passes before they come across a blue planet, and by that time Keith had almost forgotten what such a thing would look like. Earth is rapidly becoming a distant memory; like the house in the desert, it’s a time in his life that he has closed the book on.

But then they see the blue planet while standing on the ship’s bridge, on screens thirty feet high, and it’s beautiful—like a drop of water, an oasis, glistening in a black desert. White clouds swirling, sweeping across the surface and Pidge’s digital readout of the elements present point to a breathable atmosphere. Even the Alteans look on with longing—after all, they once had a blue planet of their own.

Keith looks at them all looking at the screen, and tries to imagine in his heart what they're feeling, tries to conjure up a facsimile of their emotions. They must be thinking about all the lives on that planet, just like any other planet they need to save... no, that's not quite right. In fact he's thinking so hard about this, trying so hard to understand, that he almost misses the way that Hunk reaches out to hold Lance's shoulder; the worried look he gives Lance.

Almost, but not quite. Lance shakes Hunk’s hand off with a grin, that careless laugh that insists, with a kind of steely determination, that nothing is wrong. “What are you getting all misty-eyed on me for?” he says. “I’m _fine_ , man. Save your worry for some other time.”

And maybe Keith would have believed it in the long term, if he hadn't gone to the kitchen for a midnight snack that night and found Lance crying silently over a half-empty bowl of food goo.

There's an awkward silence when their eyes meet across the room, and then Lance hurriedly scrubs at his face to wipe away the tear tracks, although this does not magically conceal the puffiness of his eyes.

“This isn't what it looks like,” he says, and then goes on, with a half-manic laugh, “I'm just—I'm seriously sick of food goo, you know? I'd _kill_ for some texture.”

Contrary to popular belief, Keith is not actually, literally heartless; he's just got a little less experience with being human than others might. But even so, he has old memories to rely on, memories of being comforted in the warm circle of his father’s arms; of being picked up and set back on his feet whenever he fell and scraped a knee.

So he doesn't say anything, doesn’t try to rely on a tool as unreliable as his words. Instead, he moves across the room and seats himself on the bench next to Lance. Having done so, he still doesn’t know what to say, but then it doesn’t matter—before long, Lance is leaning into him, and then there’s nothing but the weight of two, and the way that your breathing mingles with another’s, when you get just close enough. The slant of Lance’s jaw, hewn to his throat; the thunder of his pulse, and the temperature of his skin because he’s alive and breathing, _living_ , in this singular slice of time.

His mouth moves soundlessly, forming the words over and over— _I want to go home. I miss home_. His face scrunched up, as if in pain; he clings to Keith like he’s drowning in his arms

“—you don’t know,” Lance gasps, and in this moment, Keith knows he’s talking about himself. His voice is raw. “You don’t know just—how much you’ll miss it—’till it’s _gone_ —”   

And Keith holds him. Just holds him, for he can do little else; holds him like his heart is made of glass. While he quakes in Keith’s arms, the tears that drip down his cheeks splash onto Keith’s trouser leg, leaving wet marks, the way waves carve rivulets into the shore. These are the stories that no one tells, he knows; and once he lets go of Lance, this moment, too, will fade away into the annals of dusty memory.

But perhaps one moment’s enough. He strokes Lance’s hair, the touch of his hand like a lover’s, and thinks not of tomorrow, only today. Where Lance is, that’s where he’ll be.

 

vi.

Keith isn’t sure what to make of them; him and Lance, Lance and him, the shape of them and the way that they fit together, awkward, yet somehow still perfectly aligned.

At least there are no rules against fraternization in Voltron, not like it is in the military. But no matter. Everyone seems to know. Hell, Pidge probably knew before he did. He doesn’t have the words to formulate a concept for what they are, but there it is all the same.

And sometimes—not very often, mind you, what with the war going on and whatnot—but maybe just once in a while, they get in a pod together and just... fly, no particular destination in mind. And when they find somewhere that looks promising, he lands the pod and they walk a ways, until they find somewhere to rest, and to simply... _be_.

On this occasion, this happens to be a particular grassy knoll, not unlike the kind you might find on a certain blue planet. When Lance plops himself down there onto his back to stare up at the sky, Keith follows his lead, nestling himself down in the rustling grass.

(Their elbows touch, but barely.)

For a long time, he’s quiet, and Lance is quiet too, unusual as that is. In fact, Keith is the one who speaks first.  He doesn’t know why he brings it up—maybe it’s just been on his mind, or maybe war is making him sick in the head. Maybe a little of column A, a little of column B. Nevertheless.

Nevertheless. There’s a story Keith knows from his childhood, and when he tells Lance this story—about the girl, and the boy, and the river between them, and the magpies—Lance only chuckles.

“That’s dumb,” he says. Far overhead, from a distance so great that no human mind could possibly comprehend it, the constellations wink down at them.

Keith blinks. “Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He can almost hear Lance rolling his eyes. “Look. If there’s something out there you want, just reach out and grab it.”

And Lance, with a slow but purposeful movement, raises his arm, reaching up as though to grasp the sky itself. The light filtering between his fingers dapples his face, casting strips of it into shade.

And then, right then, it strikes Keith with brilliant, shockingly painful clarity: Lance is the cowherd, and the Earth is his weaver girl, and between them rests a sea of stars. Would that his hand could bridge the sky—span the vast, unknowable reaches of the universe, and encircle the earth, his home, in his palm. But he knows now, clearer than ever: Lance is looking, has always been looking, at something far beyond him, a love and a desire he’s barely begun to fathom.

And all of a sudden he wants, _needs_ , fervently and furiously, like a thirst, like the flares of a dying star—all the things on Earth he’s never seen, might never see. The ocean, seaside cottages, the stars and the sky reflected in the waves at night; the feeling of rain on his face, or the sound of snowfall, or vistas of white-topped mountains. A blanket of city lights in the darkness, condensation beading on glass and stilling into webs of frost; grass waving in early morning breeze around an empty mailbox in June— _June_ , summer, seasons, how could he have forgotten _seasons_? A world that changed with the time of day and year, a place when the sky was so tall it seemed infinite, speckled clouds and endless possibility, where you could lean back and catch the breath of the wind. Earth. _Home_.

Keith can hardly put any of this into words; in fact he can hardly breathe, and the tightness in his chest has everything and nothing to do with the boy lying beside him. He is a ball of contradictions; a quiet, shaking mess.

He rolls onto his side, away from Lance, and hides his face and his shame in the crook of his arm. And even though, in the end, no tears come—somewhere on Earth, rain is falling. It’s still falling.

 

vii.

What must it be like, Keith wonders, to be a satellite, orbiting the Earth in the vast blackness of space, alone but for the bits that come pulsing over a wire. Or a telescope, searching the depths of the universe; believing truly, earnestly, that what you’re looking for is out there somewhere, buried in a sea of stars.

(If somehow he became a satellite, a shooting star, would his body burn up when he finally tumbled back to earth?)

There are so many things he doesn’t know, about space and its wonders. Red dwarves, white dwarves; blackholes and wormholes—Pidge lent him a book about those, once. Inside, on one particularly dog-eared page, it said that under the right circumstances—like maybe if the stars were aligned, just so—you could utilize a wormhole, and travel through time.

Maybe somewhere out there, there’s a civilization that tells a story like that. A hero passes through a wormhole, transcending the sands of time, and delivers a message to his younger self. Some little nugget of wisdom, maybe, or a warning; something like that.

Keith isn’t like some of the others, with their idealism, their fancies—he knows that this could never happen. But maybe, just maybe, if this was a story, and Keith was the hero of it—maybe he could find a wormhole and jump in, and when he popped out on the other end, there he’d find himself, sleeping alone in a little shack at the end of the world. And there, faced with the boy he used to be, he’d say to himself: don’t worry. He’d say: you don’t have to be afraid. You won’t be alone.

You’re not alone anymore.

 

 

viii.

Imagine, if you will, the sun setting on you for the last time.

Imagine a mission—the very last mission—a mission for the fate of the universe.

Imagine the end of the war, the end of fighting. The end of war itself.  

(Imagine that there can _be_ an end to war; that something so fragile, so precious as peace could even _exist_ , let alone last through the ages.)

Imagine that after this, you will go home, and that there will be peace forevermore.

Imagine a story with a happy ending.

Over the intercom, rustling with static, Lance is humming. With or without words, it’s a song that Keith thinks he knows.

(If he tries hard enough, he thinks he can see it: the restless blue of Lance’s eyes.)

(Maybe if heaven takes pity on him, he could even see it once a year, for the rest of eternity.)

 _Easy now_ , Pidge murmurs. _The wormhole’s as stable as I could make it, but still—_

She doesn’t finish her sentence. And after a moment, Lance’s voice returns. A small light blinks in the corner of Keith’s eye. It’s a private transmission.

_You afraid?_

Lance’s voice shakes, or else crackles with static.

 _No_ , Keith lies. _Are you?_

 _No_ , says Lance.

And this, Keith knows, is a lie, too.

The lights come on. They tumble out the other side of the wormhole, one after another, head over heels out into normal space-time.

Before them: hundreds, thousands of ships. Circling, swarming around the mothership, vicious cells in an endless, evil body.

_Like a sea of stars._

Keith hears Pidge’s soft gasp over the commlink, and he knows: this is where their story ends. The final chapter. And afterwards, everyone will be free. The universe will be saved, and there will be celebrations forevermore...

_Do you think it’s raining on Earth?_

Keith never believed in fairytales.

_This is it._

_We’re going in_.

Close your eyes, and make a wish.

 

 

 

_let me tell you a story, darling, a story to take your breath away, a story of hope, and a story to ruin us. a timeless story, a love story, a tale of me and you. fingertips climbing the staircase of your spine, circling your wrists, your mouth open like a prayer. the sand in your hair like stars and the waves beating at your calves, washing away, sweeping away all fear and regrets. dear bright-eyes, tuck me in and sing me to sleep—_

_i lost you once, but i’ll find you again in my dreams._

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos greatly appreciated! Your feedback gives me life. :D


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